Cutting off the petals so you can get to the thorn
by seriousish
Summary: It was a normal day. Pam was tending to her garden, waiting for her girlfriend to get home from work. Then she learned that the Joker had escaped - in the worst way possible. Joker/Harley


Pam tried to sort the colorless puzzle pieces of the last hour into a shape, but it was like cutting the thorns from a rose. That's what she'd been doing, more or less, when Harleen had come home from the asylum. The condo they shared was modest even by the Gotham housing market, but Pam's plants and Harleen's murals made it feel like a mansion. They were so different, their lives almost at cross-purposes. Pam was the exterior, her flora cresting the windows and transoms like curious children poking their heads out, while Harleen was the interior. In the closets and pantries where only mushrooms grew, her paintings glowed in the dark like the skeleton of their home.

Pam had been tending to her bonsai tree when a sharp pain

Harleen had gotten her the bonsai tree in college. They'd been roommates then, even straight. It'd only taken a few environmental rallies, a few drinks after the rallies, for that to change. Harleen's art was beautiful then

it was still beautiful

but it hadn't been so frightening then. There were pastoral scenes, paintings of paradise untouched by Man, a memorable Georgia O'Keefe parody achieved by a distant relative of fingerpainting, some nudes of Pam that made her look like a goddess instead of the dowdy researcher she was. It was working at Arkham, with that psycho Crane, that had warped Harleen's imagination. Her latest project was crayon drawings, but of things no child should ever see.

If only her old paintings had sold. If only Pam could get a grant. Maybe they could move somewhere like Star City, get married, adopt some kids. Harleen loved kids.

Harleen. The hurt had been Harleen. The door had opened and closed, there'd been footsteps, Ivy had asked how Harleen's day had been… then she'd felt a sharp pain in her neck as Harleen drove a syringe into her. The rest was darkness. Pam was buried like a seed and she waited anxiously to bloom.

Pain was her soil, nightmares her water. She opened her eyes to see she'd been tied up and moved into the greenhouse. Diffused light was reddening her just as it was her plants and experiments. Flasks glowed like they were on fire. But the smell was wrong, not earthy, but mannish… bloody. It was coming from…

_Him_. Harleen's latest patient, the one she worked day and night to psychoanalyze, the man who'd held Gotham hostage. The Joker. He still wore his straitjacket, the undone sleeves bunched up at his elbows. Scars criss-crossed the pale undersides of his arms, his hands were dusty with white foundation powder, and blood was clotted under his nails. The reason Pam was so fixated on his hands was the scalpel clutched loosely in one, the blade already brown with dried blood. And she knew who he'd used it on.

Harleen stood next to him, the shoulders of her lab coat dappled with blood like the first drops of a rainstorm. Her face… Jesus God, her face had been so lovely. Now there were two upside-down triangles carved below her eyes, scabbed over, and her beautiful smile had been distorted by cuts up to her ears, stitched up to keep it in a permanent, ghoulish grin.

Rage overran fear. "What the hell did you do to her, you son of a bitch?"

"I freed her." Joker's face was a crude approximation of his usual war paint, cobbled together from the couple's cosmetics. His green hair was still close-cropped from the asylum's shaving. Harleen had said they'd done it after he smuggled razor blades in there one too many times. "Apparently I have a knack for that. Just ask the humble DA."

"Harvey Dent? But he's dead."

He leaned so close that Pam could swear she saw yellow teeth through his scars. "_Now_ you're getting it."

Pam couldn't hold them back anymore. Her tears overwhelmed her steely gaze, transforming her from woman into _victim_. "Please. I'll do whatever you want, just please let Harleen go—"

He slapped her across the face and she saw stars, novaing into colored clouds when she shut her eyes. "**Don't be selfless, be a survivor!**" Joker screamed in her ear, in her head. "Besides," his voice moved lower, "that, ah, dilemma isn't in your painted hands." She felt his tongue flicker over her fingers. His breath was even hotter when it hit her pulse: "_Harley_?"

"Yes mistah J?" It wasn't Harleen's voice, wasn't the intelligent croon that brightened Pam's day, but a simpering little girl put-upon.

"Your name is Harlee—" Pam started to say when a stinging slap cut her off. This one had a ring turned inward, leaving blood boiling over her cheek. Pam had gotten her that ring; three months of working retail.

"I'm not yours, I'm the Joker's!" Her enraged voice was perversely closer to Dr. Quinzel's, even if the revulsion of 'yours' and the fawning adoration of 'the Joker' made it unrecognizable.

"Harley," Joker said, lilting her name as if this little drama hadn't just played out. "You told me that you and the green thumb here have been busy little beavers." Pam tilted her head away uselessly as the Joker's mouth captured her ear. "Keeps a man _warm_ on those cold Arkham nights. Mwah!" He let her ear go, his teeth marks still in her earlobe. "Now me… _clearly_ a firm believer in alternate lifestyles. But I think you were lacking a _little_ something Harley needed to be satisfied? To be, oh let's say ful_filled_?"

"You're sick," she moaned through her tears, which were mixed of equal parts pain and despair.

"That would be it. What can I say, she loves me for my deviant, twisted mind. Like they say," his knuckles rapped on her forehead, "it's not the size that counts, it's how you kill with it."

He laughed, Harleen's giggling a counterpoint to it. It made Pam want to vomit. _I am a mighty oak, the storm can blow but it will not uproot me, I am a tall redwood, the rain water will just make me grow…_ "Harl, it's me. It's your Red. I don't know what he's done to you but I can fix it, I love you."

When Joker hit her this time, it was with a closed fist instead of an open palm. Pam felt her consciousness uprooted.

"There's no such thing as love," Joker said, low and deadly. "Hey, kid_do_, break-up music," he called to Harleen.

Harley played "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" on her kazoo as she danced through Pam's lab, upending all of the botany experiments. The frankenfood that was more Bram Stoker than Mary Shelley, the fertilizer that was more than fertile, the ivy that could defend against loggers… Her life's work, mixing together like the shatters her life had become. Pam made a token attempt at resistance as the Joker threw her in the compost heap –"Face it, you've been dumped." – but what did she have to live for?

The answer came to her hours after Batman had arrived too late to save her. Revenge. She had a whole harvest of revenge to live for.


End file.
